My name is Miranda Steege, and I received my PhD in English at UC Riverside in 2022. This website offers information about my dissertation project, which I am currently revising and reworking for a future beyond the dissertation.

The project

A novel! Literary criticism! Fanfiction! All these things and more! Project may include: ghosts; murder; Hannibal fanfiction; detectives making out; formal experimentation; nineteenth-century female protagonists; academics arguing about stuff; and Captain America’s butt.

My dissertation project combines multiple genres of writing: literary and cultural criticism, a mystery novel, personal writing, and fanfiction. It is a work of experimental criticism and experimental fiction that puts multiple modes and genres of writing in conversation with each other.

The novel takes place in a dysfunctional English department in a fictional Pittsburgh university. The novel’s narrator, a Ph.D. student named Lu Fairchild, is writing a dissertation that interrogates contemporary sexual politics via Victorian texts and contemporary queer fanfiction. I am writing both the novel and Lu’s dissertation, along with some of Lu’s fanfiction.

BUT WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS

I write about forms of sex and forms of selfhood as a way to search for a queer sexual politics adequate to the challenges of contemporary sexual culture. I argue that such a sexual politics must refuse a singular strategy or a perfect, universal solution–that it must commit itself to diversion, digression, repetition, and multiplicity. It’s not a politics that can be summed up in a singular academic argument, however complex. It’s important to approach questions around sexual politics–questions about consent and agency, institutional policies, sexual access, and more–from multiple sites and through multiple modes of inquiry, thus resisting the fantasy that we can arrive at some place of total, unproblematic purity in which all sex is perfectly equitable and power-free. Coming at these questions through literary fiction, through fanfiction, and through academic writing about both the past and the present creates a methodology and a form that actually enacts the argument of the project. Producing a variety of linked forms of writing also offers opportunities to connect with a variety of different kinds of audiences. I want my work to be rigorous and intellectual, but also to strain at the seams of any given genre or platform it attempts to occupy. The sprawl of my project–its hybridity, its refusal to adhere to disciplinary or generic boundaries, its complexity and its messiness–is, above all, a queer mode of thinking, feeling, and writing.